The rent's too high, the air's unclean,The beaches are dirty and the people are mean,And the women are big and the men are dumb,And the children are loopy cuz they live in a slum!The water is polluted and their mayor's a dork,They dress real bad and they think they're New York......

I never used disasters in my cities if I could turn it off. Fires and whatnot are disaster enough. I never had any urge to destroy what I had made. I especially hate the unrealistic disasters. Come on, giant monster? Alien attack?

Clearly the giant monster and alien attack are merely stand-ins for the damage done by corrupt politicians and idiot bosses (like those at Electronic Arts), respectively. How I wish the first had a single monstrous eye and clawed arms and an omnimuous black finishing in real life, it would make recognising them much easier. However, representing idiot bosses using UFOs was not required - you usually notice right away they are not of this world.

Detroit failed because of those policies that drove the tax base away. Yes, that is entirely the city's fault. No one has any moral obligation whatsoever to live in any given place. Quite the reverse: it's the city leadership's job to make the city inviting. But Detroit chose a different path.

Tax laws are a big part of what makes both people and businesses want to come or go, balanced by the degree to which those tax dollars actually make the city a better place (the absence of corruption). A city seek

All the city's productivity and investment? Gone, because private companies decided they could just pack their bags and walk away.

And they were right. Once again, the victims get blamed because the city drove them away. All these companies, all those workers, and all that productivity and investment would have stayed if the environment were far less toxic.

I also find it odd how irrelevant the "myths" of your story are to the original poster's assertion. For example, "Detroit will be saved by bankruptcy" is just so totally on topic.

More blaming the victim garbage (though bonus points for pretending the victims were the perpetrators). There are plenty of other cities out there that would and, as it turned out, did treat the people or businesses formerly of Detroit well.

You can spin these ridiculous fantasies about "con artists" and "fixing their mess" (said mess not actually being theirs), but the bottom line is that in a free world, other people aren't forced to deal with your shit. When you treat them like crap, they leave.

As an aside, there's been a number of complaints in recent years about work and how there's too much of it. The basic idea there seems to be that people are forced to do it so everyone needs more freedom in being able to reject choices that cause them to endure more work drudgery.

Well, this is one of those choices. And as a result, somewhere around half the population of Detroit decided they'd rather be somewhere else than suffer through Detroit and its many problems. So you have to decide what is more i

Really? I found sim city 4 to be quite bad compared to sim city 3 it is overly complex in some departments and the UI could be a lot better. But what really grinds my gears in sim city 4 are all the The Sims advisors and people running around, the advisors in Sim City 3 had a lot of character and were quite funny as well.

SC4 was the last "real" SimCity before EA started completely raping the franchise. (They only raped SC4 a little.)

The region mechanic was a completely game-able loophole. It needed quite a bit of work, TBH.

Go to small city area, fill with landfills and a road. Go to neighboring large city area, build a beautiful, trash-free city. Never re-load the original or even think about it again lest it update its region stats and go bankrupt while poisoning the entire universe. Repeat with anything that is undesirabl

The region mechanic was a completely game-able loophole. It needed quite a bit of work, TBH.

The region mechanic was always an attempt to limit the size of the simulation. The individual citizes in SC4 are too small, presumably because the machines of the day couldn't handle bigger ones. So a real improvement would be redoing the game as a 64-bit only version and discarding the region system.

It's not just a computer hardware limitation; the simulator gets very inefficient at certain things. I running a reasonably modern system with 12GB RAM, and a large amount of custom content (20-40,000 files totalling 8-12GB, common among everyone still playing) on a large city still brings my system to its knees. Switching to underground view for subways, for instance, takes at least 20 seconds.

God, SC4 was so much fun. I wonder if I can get it working on my 64-bit Win7 box. Last I checked, it had some problems with that.

There's no problems at all running it on Win7 x64. And you should see the amazing custom content that's still being developed. Not just the thousands upon thousands of buildings; but an entirely new highway system with 2-10 lanes and completely custom ramps, tile-by-tile canal systems, or the incredibly detailed modular airports- can cover an entire large city tile with just an expansive airport; I released an entire plugin that's just tiles to make lines on the taxiways. Other modular sets let you construc

Well I was a lot younger when I used to play sim city 3, but as far as complexity goes, it is way more complex than sim city 2. Yet it was not as frustrating because you don't need to electrify and provide water for every single block by hand like in sim city 2, that was annoying as hell.

I haven't played sim city 4 as much as I have 3 and 2, but I will give it a try. I haven't played 5 either, I don't mind so much about the always online bullshit, but when I saw you needed to make several smaller cities lik

Ok, have to give SOME credit to SC5 for this. You don't have to micromanage getting utilities to everyone. The distribution system appears random and thus can be sucky if your building is out of water or power and is off on a long branch with a bunch of buildings in between. It will take forever to get the utility watering or powering them again.
Upgradable buildings is another plus, though I have hosed myself several times by not leaving space to upgrade around the building itself. Come on people, build UP

SC4 was the best graphically and simulation wise to date. The awful part of SC$ was the stupid side missions which must be accomplished to unlock this or that thing, most of which involved trying to control a vehicle on a diagonal roadway with a keyboard. Total setup for the BS which is Simcity5 Online Version.

SimCity2000 I would also agree was the best. Playing that game on My AST Adventure Advantage! 6066d (MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11) was so much fun. I put alot of time and effort in building those cities. Putting all those water pipes was a chore! It was a great game and it sure brings back alot of memories. Remember, if you will, we also had Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 on floppy disks that also came out! Great times and great games!

Specifically the DOS version, not the windows one.As I recall, the DOS version allowed you to speed up the game, while windows would not.I used this feature to make tons of money and let changes stabilize overnight while I slept.

If only, Los Angeles has a vanishingly small subway system. One subway line that goes from downtown LA to North Hollywood, and an aborted line that was meant to go to Santa Monica but only made it to Wilshire.

Cars wouldn't be much of a problem. Within hours of all cars breaking down there would be small businesses offering to transport goods from stores to your door with makeshift bicycle drawn carriages. The distances are also small enough that a lot of people could go get supplies on foot.

Highway trucks and freight trains on the other hand. Yeah, that would be bad. If someone hacked all highway trucks and freight train locomotives, starvation would set in within a couple of days, since there is no other way to

I've lived in cold snow blasted parts of the US where roads can shut down for days due to winter storms. After a couple of days the super markets and liquor store shelves start looking a bit... bare. I have no doubt a few days of interruptions would cause problems. My solution is camping gear; including water purification kit; and a pantry which includes canned good and dried food such as lentils and dried fruit. A few days,,, meh. A month, then I will be taking notice.

I wonder if, in time, we will see a regression back to city-states once urban populations get big enough. Tokyo is basically its own country, and the same goes for SF, LA, and NYC.

I believe the limiting factor on country size is 1) communication ability, and 2) transportation (force projection) ability.

Roads were a major factor in the size of the Roman Empire, for example. City-states were common when there was no force regionally large enough to conquer the city. City states also needed to maintain farmland surrounding them, so they could remain fed.

I've heard tell of some people who managed to get 600k or so in SC5, but yes, it is crap. Highly visual and oooh shiny crap, but crap.
For those unaware, they finally came out with the offline version back in March, but I was so disgusted with the initial online only launch that I didn't even know this until a few weeks ago. I bought it, and am highly, highly disappointed. A HUGE step backward from Simcity4 in almost every area.
The city sizes are tiny. Basically, you can get a perhaps 10 by 10 city block

SimCity 2013 can't scale to anywhere near such numbers because it's a more fine grained simulation. This is like saying a car is crap because it can't fit the number of people a bus can.

If you were to analyze the city you'd quickly realize that the statistical systems used in SC4 are a rather coarse approximation of reality with many downsides. They're a "top-down" approach to 2013's "bottom-up". Mind you, 2013 also had many approximations in order to reduce performance requirements so that the average pl

Maybe, but I don't think that any real discussion could be had about our megacity future based on this type of video game. Notice there is no food growing anywhere, very little greenery (think pollution), every inch of terrain was flattened, there was no water, etc..

Don't get me wrong, I think SimCity is a cool game. I don't think it's simulation software, and therein lies the big issue.

Building using a grid layout never changes. Back when I first played sim city on the Super Nintendo, the strategy to build megalopolis (population 500k+) was building on a grid. You build using 3x3 clusters of R, C or I but left the center of the 3x3 open. Instead you put special buildings and police/fire buildings in the center of the 3x3. To reduce pollution you built rail instead of roads. Fun game for its time and a friend and I came close to a megalopolis on stock maps without beating the scenarios, alien invasion and getting the water free map. I think we had 480-490k people.

In SC5, the traffic algorithm is so broken that a grid layout will leave you awash in traffic jams. The most efficient layout in SC5 is a snake pattern with one end being the (single) connection to the region.

It always annoyed me how in previous versions you could just build huge blocks of buildings without direct access to a road.

SimCity 4 was the first iteration that required buildings to have road access to develop or to be of benefit to the area and this brought with it a vast variety of different types of roads and this was probably the best improvement of the series IMO because it meant you really have to think about the layout of your city and balance the cost of building roads versus streets everywhere a

Eight months? Wouldn't it be more efficient to learn programming(if needed), understand the layout of the map file, and write a script to generate this very well structured and organized hell on earth?

Couldn't that be said of any game? Write a better AI and let it play itself? Why do any gaming when programming is more efficient?